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- Herausgeber: Al-Mashreq eBookstore
- Kategorie: Krimi
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
The Moss Mystery by Carolyn Wells is a tantalizing puzzle that will captivate mystery lovers from start to finish. When the renowned Moss family is shaken by a shocking murder in their grand estate, the serene façade of their wealthy lifestyle begins to crack. The only clue left at the scene is a cryptic message that leads to more questions than answers. As amateur sleuths and professional investigators alike dig into the case, they uncover a labyrinth of secrets, lies, and hidden motives. Can they solve the enigmatic Moss Mystery before more lives are lost? Dive into this riveting tale and uncover the truth hidden beneath the moss-covered surface.
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Table of Contents
The Moss Mystery
Chapter 1 - Insidious Marybelle
Chapter 2 - Murder Or Suicide
Chapter 3 - The Moonstone Ring
Chapter 4 - The Coroner
Chapter 5 - A Blind Alley
Chapter 6 - Six Sides To A Room
Chapter 7 - The Missing Necklace
Chapter 8 - Footsteps In The Night
Chapter 9 - Trailed!
Landmarks
Table of Contents
Cover
The Moss Mystery
Chapter 1 - Insidious Marybelle
Different men are of different opinions,
Some like apples, some like inions.
That, I hold, is incontrovertible philosophy. How much truer it is, than, for instance, Emerson’s dazzling generality, “All the world loves a lover.”
But then, what generality is true? Yet, far truer than the latter epigram is this simple statement: All the world loves a mystery. And on this rock I build my tale.
I am a living man, and he is a Fictional Detective, but that is the only way in which I radically differ from Sherlock Holmes. We are both wonderful detectives, and I know of no other in our class. We can pluck out the heart of a mystery, unerringly, and with the least possible waste motion. I say this for myself without vanity or conceit. I have no patience with the modesty that deprecates skilled achievement. Even Holmes’s “Elementary, really, my dear Watson,” is distasteful to me. But the poor man couldn’t help it. His author wrote it about him. Now, I rate my work at its true value, and never underestimate it. Elementary, indeed! As well call the architecture of the Parthenon elementary.
A detective is merely a man who discerns the true and the relevant from a mass of false and unimportant evidence. That is all.
And I always do it. My confidence is founded on never failing experience in the past and no fear of failure in the future. It has always been so. As a child, picture puzzles flew together under my fingers, and little fiddly steel-ring puzzles fell apart in my hands. Charades, riddles, abstruse mathematical problems or tricky fallacies presented to me no difficulties of solution; and now I trust you realize my status as a detective.
My name is Owen Prall, and though that doesn’t sound like a detective’s name at first, it does, the more you come to think of it. My personal appearance is a little better than average, and though I am not handsome, I like to think I have an air of distinguishment; but this varies, after a chameleonic fashion, with my surroundings. I have a thick mane of hair about the color of apple-sauce. This proves the theory, a true one, that abundance of hair denotes unusual intuitive powers.
Now, as every man has his own pet unfulfilled desire, as some dream of perpetual motion and others of a way to make an omelette without breaking eggs, so I have always longed with the keenest intensity for a certain kind of a case.
To me, cases are cases. While my heart is shocked and sorrowed by a murder, my brain becomes at once awake, with its loins girt and staff in hand, ready for the trail that shall lead straight, or, at least surely, to the criminal.
Yet, though I have tracked criminals by all the hackneyed clues of broken cufflinks, initialed revolvers, footprints and fingerprints, never, until the Great Moss Mystery, did I have the case I wanted, the conditions I had longed for for years; namely: a murder committed in an absolutely inaccessible room. I have read stories based on this plot, but the solution has always been so unsatisfactory—a secret panel or an implausible contrivance of some sort—that my clue-finding fingers fairly itched to tackle a problem like that in real life —and real death.
You must remember, as I said, to me a case is a case, not a human document, though the motive was human enough, God knows, for the Moss murder. And the room was certainly inaccessible to a mortal human being.
I went to Woodshurst on the invitation of its mistress, Marybelle Moss, a widow, whom I had known something less than a year. She was a cousin of Frank Wesley’s wife, and Frank was an old friend of mine, and I liked his wife, and I more than liked the widowed Marybelle.
No, I wasn’t a bit in love with her. On the contrary, I was not sure I liked her. But she fascinated me. Marybelle—And by the way, what a funny thing it is, the use of Christian names. Some people you always pick up by their prefix; and then some, though these are rare, you want to call by their first names the moment you meet them. Marybelle was this sort, and it may have been partly due to the pretty name combination. The two names were never spoken separately and it made her sound like some sort of strange new flower. But she wasn’t specially like a flower, unless an orchid, nor was she of a new or strange type. Rather, the oldest type of all femininity, older even than Mother Eve.
She was, for I may as well describe her here, a siren; she was almost, but not quite, a vampire. Of exquisite manner, of desperate charm and of a luring, haunting fascination that could only have been excelled in the temperament of the Pied Piper of Hamelin.
Marybelle possessed a very white face, quantities of very auburn hair, gold-glinted, and eyes that are called by such meaningless names as beryl or hazel. Witch hazel would be better. And now you know all about Marybelle, except her wonderful hands—delicate, inviting hands, that seemed to beckon, even though they lay still.
She had been a widow for about a year and a half, long enough, as widows go now, and the house party for which I was bound, was, I surmised, of the nature of an announcement party. For Marybelle, so Wesley’s wife had told me, had wiled her way into the heart of no less a catch than a Belted Earl (I assume the belt) and it was rumored that a second marriage venture would make Mrs. Moss a Countess.
I had only met her in town, and this was my first visit to her home at Barrowsville, a small village within easy motoring distance of New York. The place, I thought, was rather ostentatiously titled Woodshurst, for it was merely a big frame house of the architecture of the early seventies, one of the worst periods America boasts. Square, even cubic, with, another smaller cube on top for a cupola. A large rear “extension,” and recently added porte-cochere and sun parlor relieved the cubicity but added to the ungracefulness.
And yet, the charm of the hostess permeated the whole place, and I felt, the moment I entered the hall, the lure of Marybelle. The very blaze of the fires, the flicker of the candles and the scent of the massed flowers, with here and there a burning pastille, all assailed my senses as with the wiles of an enchantress, quite obliterating any impressions that might have been made by the blatant pomposity of the black walnut doors and heavy plaster cornices.
Everything was more or less remodeled. Hardwood floors replaced the pine boards, and electric fixtures had been attached to the great gas chandeliers, so that the effects were as anomalous inside as out. But all was blended and harmonized by the magic of the mistress, and I went to my room, on the third floor, conscious of a distinctly pleasant feeling of anticipation.
I did not see Marybelle until the dinner hour, and then the sudden flash of welcome in her eyes, the greeting smile on her scarlet, sensitive lips and the touch of her warm, vital hands thrilled me as no woman ever had before. No, I insist it was only interest and—well, curiosity. I wanted to study her, for I had never before met just such a woman.
“Mr. Prall,” she cried, gaily, “how darling of you to come! I was so afraid you wouldn’t, and I simply had to have you. How do you want to be entertained? By a debutante’s chatter, or some man-talk? There’s a tiny bit of time before dinner. Oh, here’s a man I want you to meet, Geoffrey, Earl Herringdean, Mr. Prall.”
I liked his lordship at once. When an English nobleman is a good sort, he’s an awfully good sort, and Herringdean was one, it seemed to me.
The debutante was Cissy Carreau, a very young and very Frenchy bit of slenderness, who sat next me at dinner. She proved to be little more than a giggling schoolgirl, and I turned to the lady at my left. She was Miss Field, Marybelle’s companion, and she showed just the right combination of vivacity and repression that a companion ought to exhibit. Apparently she was used to it, for the role fitted her and required no effort. Mrs. Wesley and Marybelle were the only other women and the men were Herringdean, Wesley, Bellamy and myself.
“Rock” Bellamy, I never knew whether his name was Rockwell or Rockingham or what, was the village cut-up. I don’t suppose they called him that, but it tickets him sufficiently for the moment.
The dinner hour was merry, really gay. Being only eight of us, the conversation was general and everybody did his best to entertain and be entertained. Both are exertions for me, as I like best to study people without bothering to talk or be talked to. And here was an interesting bunch to study. From Marybelle, always predominant, down to little Cissy, piping out her absurd opinions, they were all worthwhile bits of human nature.
The Earl, though quite evidently unaccustomed to American vivacity, was adaptable, and in his big, good-humored way appreciated the quick-fire, up-to-date repartee. And this was fortunate, for after his engagement to Marybelle was announced he was subjected to raillery and jocund toasts that were not always in accordance with his English point of view. But he laughed with the rest and responded easily and appropriately, if not in kind.
After dinner there was bridge. Only four of us played, however, as the newly betrothed pair felt privileged to wander off by themselves, and Frank Wesley wanted to smoke. Miss Field effaced herself, so Cissy Carreau and I played against Helen Wesley and Bellamy.
Yes, I am getting to the story, but the bridge game is of a certain importance, as showing how the veriest trifles blaze trails to great, possibilities. Well, I don’t care if that is a little mixed as to metaphor, it’s true. And you have to give all the necessary data in the body of a mystery story. It isn’t fair to spring a surprise at the end that couldn’t possibly have been foreseen by the astute reader. And, too, I’m telling this Moss Mystery story just as it happened. And though it hadn’t begun to happen at the time we played Bridge, yet what occurred at the card table had, I think, a great bearing on the theories of solution, at least in the minds of many of us.
It seems Cissy Carreau was psychic. That means that somebody who wanted to hold her hand had told her she had a psychic hand, and that sort of twaddle. But she took it seriously and had dipped into the matters of table-tipping and spirit-rapping more than I should have advised for any eighteen-year-old girl, if I’d had any say on the subject. But Cissy’s people thought it cunning and so she went to séances and such things at will. And lately—she told us about this while I was dealing, and I held a card motionless above my own pile till she finished—she had been studying up on Poltergeist.
“What’s that, for gracious sake?” asked Helen Wesley.
“I know,” volunteered Rock. “The ghosts throw things around the room and drag you out of bed—”
“Yes,” said Cissy, her eyes shining with a deep tensity, “and they stick pins in you. Oh, hundreds of them! And they roll up your clothes in bundles and set fire to them! It’s perfectly wonderful!”
“You believe in these things, Miss Carreau?” said I, in a tone just sufficiently skeptical to lead her on.
“Oh, yes, I know all about them.” And she gave my ignorance a pitying smile. “Why I’ve read of the world renowned cases. Mary Jobson, you know, she heard raps and knocks all the time, and wonderful music, and things; and the Amherst mystery, Esther Cox, she was marvelous! Why, the control—that’s what they call the Polter ghost—used to throw lighted matches at her and milk pitchers, and oh, it’s frightfully interesting! I’m wild over it! Think of sitting all alone in a room and have a milk pitcher fly at your head—Oh!”
The exclamation was caused by the fact that the little pile of cards I had dealt to Cissy, just then flew up and hit her in the face.
There was no apparent human agency in the matter, they rose in a heap, struck her dainty little turned-up nose and fell back to the table, where they lay quiet.
“Who did that?” cried Helen Wesley, sharply. But no one replied, each looking a little foolishly at the cards.
“It’s Poltergeist!” exclaimed Cissy in an awe-struck but by no means frightened tone. “I wish they’d do it again.”
And again the pile of cards flew up at her, but this time they mostly fell to the floor.
“Have to have a new deal ” said Rock Bellamy, as several of the cards lay faced on the floor.
“Oh,” cried Cissy, “how can you think of dealing when we may be on the verge of some marvelous revelation! I’m psychic, you know; perhaps we can get into communication with the—”
“Don’t!” whispered Helen Wesley. “I— I hate that sort of thing! I—I’m afraid—”
“Nonsense!” broke in Bellamy. “There’s nothing to be afraid of, Mrs. Wesley; but there’s nothing in it, either. The draft must have done that.”
“Draft!” I exclaimed. “Fling those cards about like that! Fiddlesticks!”
But Rock gathered up the cards and gave them to me and I dealt over again. I had almost reached the last card, when again the pile in front of Cissy flew up and darted through the air, landing finally in far corners of the room.
Mrs. Wesley gave a scream and ran out into the hall, seeking her husband. Cissy turned very white, but clenched her psychic hands, determined to go on with the performance.
I saw through it, and though sorry to interfere with Rock’s fun, I turned back the Bridge table-cover and exposed one of those little contrivances sold at “Magic” stores, which consist of a bit of small rubber tubing with a bulb on either end. One bulb, a flat one, was under the table-cover, directly in front of Cissy, and, after the cards were placed, a squeeze, by Rock, of the bulb in his waistcoat pocket expanded the other bulb and sent the cards flying.
Cissy was mad at first, then she became interested in the working of the toy and declared it was more fun than real Poltergeist for it was more tractable and obedient.
